On Alignment

This came to me as an idea originally when I was watching this excellent video about the history of alignment and the planes. Go check it out! 

So, Alignment. I know, right?! The never-ending font of Discourse™ in which not just the OSR but broader D&D has been swimming in for literally decades. And here I am, joining in that time-honored tradition. 

Alignment is a pretty decent allegory for nationalism. 

Not so much alignment in and of itself, as much as the way alignment has been approached by the people creating and playing D&D over the years. Hear me out.

Alignment comes into D&D through its inclusion by Gygax in his game Chainmail. Below are the alignment charts from Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement and OD&D. Please note that these are basically the same chart, just reproduced twice. 

Chainmail "Alignment".

OD&D Alignment.

Alignment's original purpose was quite simple. In a wargame you need two sides to fight. In Historical Wargaming (which was virtually all wargaming back in Gygax's day really) that is kind of selected for you depending on what battle or time period you are playing in. But in a fantasy game of fantasy creatures, what do you do? Well, you do what Gygax did and simply slap everyone into 3 teams and give them an excuse to fight in a game about fighting. It is, honestly, one of the better game design decisions made by Gygax. 

And from here on out is where the whole "Alignment is like Nationalism" thing starts going. Because while the purpose of alignment - giving you a reason why your dudes should fight other dudes, was clear and concise very soon, within probably a decade at most from it's creation, Alignment started to change.

It started becoming about something more than just having a side so you can punch the dudes on the other side. In B2 the Keep is Law and the humanoids are Chaos. They are barbaric and "non-civilized" and all that other fun stuff you can read about from people who've already written about it. Alignment now could no longer be a simple "us vs them" thing, it had to stand for something greater. It had to Mean Something. 

Just as the process of getting a group of people to think of themselves as a nation, while having a common enemy is more or less a prerequisite (be it The Ottomans, The British or The Jews) sooner or later people come around to invent all kinds of peripheral stuff around it. Art, culture, traditions - things which are either created out of whole cloth or simply repurposed to somehow mean something else now (the meaning being "We are a Nation"). 

Alignment had the same thing happen to it. It started as a simple pretense for violence (again, just like nationalism!) but people were not content with that. It had to Mean Something. Suddenly Law and Chaos were not just a random football team you cheered for, no no. They were  Good and Evil (despite Gygax intentionally not labeling them that in the original version of alignment above). They were about Ethics and Morals and World Views and Cosmic Struggles. 

Suddenly your alignment started to matter a whole lot - Paladins could fall from grace if they acted against their alignment. Which lead to the famous Gygax postulation that a Lawful paladin slaughtering Chaotic orc children is somehow still Lawful and not, ya know, monstrously genocidal and evil (please just imagine that from now on I just add "ya know, just like nationalism" after every statement, because I hope I've made the point clear by now). 

Suddenly there were entire other planes of existence who's purpose was to give Meaning to your alignment. You weren't just "Lawful Good" meaning you were a good boy scout (who murdered the young of thinking people like orcs), oh no! No, there is now an entire infinite plane of existence devoted to the concept of Lawful Goodness. It can't possibly be arbitrary, after all look at how much ink had been spent printing books upon books of details about why your Alignment is totally an important thing and an important part of your character.

And on and on it goes. What's important to note here is that the backlash against Alignment is itself also just something that reinforces this mythologizing of it's importance. People who declare that Alignment is stupid and you can not possibly map ethics and morality onto a 9 point grid are still acknowledging the myth that this nine point grid somehow matters. It doesn't. 

Me though? I don't really dislike Alignment. I used to, mind you. Until I realized what Alignment is actually for. And what it's for is, as was stated earlier, was an excuse to provide you a simple pretense as to why you should fight in a game about fighting. And it does that job perfectly well.